Events
Engaging our communities
Muslim Women, Activism, and New Media Cultures
Ousseina Alidou and others
Many scholars within a variety of disciplines have begun to examine the ways in which new media technologies in the Muslim world have helped amplify discussions and debates about the role and meaning of Islam in everyday life. This panel will consider how women in different Muslim contexts, who may or may not identify with […]
Read MoreStigma, Precarity, and the Everyday Life of Outcaste Labor
Anupama Rao
What forms of critical thought and cultural production are enabled by intersections between stigmatized life and the social experience of labor in twentieth-century Bombay? In her latest project, Barnard College Associate Professor of History Anupama Rao critically engages traditional approaches to labor, examining how the practices of precarious workers, such as India’s Dalits, impact the […]
Read MoreNtozake Shange on Stage and Screen
Ntozake Shange, Soyica Diggs Colbert, and Monica Miller
The 2012-13 Africana Distinguished Alumna Series honors one of Barnard’s most distinguished African American alumnae: Ntozake Shange ’70. A playwright, poet, and novelist of startling originality, Shange is best known for her 1975 Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Following the screening of Tyler Perry’s acclaimed […]
Read MoreWomen Poets at Barnard
Anne Carson and Alice Oswald
Celebrated poets Anne Carson and Alice Oswald read from their recent works, followed by a reception. Anne Carson is a poet and classics scholar. Her books of poetry include Glass, Irony and God; Plainwater; Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001; and NOX. She […]
Read MoreMoving Images: Psychoanalytically-Informed Methods in Documenting the Lives of Women Migrants and Asylum-Seekers
Janice Haaken
Many contemporary feminist projects attempt to subvert the male gaze by “bearing witness” to female trauma through visual representation. Yet these projects have tended to be under-theorized. Since visual images invoke the spectator’s experience of unmediated access to the inner world of the subject, the evocative power of photographic images may readily reproduce forms of […]
Read MoreStaking Our Claim: Trans Women’s Literature in the 21st Century
Imogen Binnie, Ryka Aoki, Donna Ostrowsky, Red Durkin, and Tourmaline
As our notions of feminism have evolved over the last several decades, so too has the body of literature by and about trans women. In this fiction reading and panel sponsored by the Barnard Library, celebrating the release of The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012), four trans women authors will […]
Read MoreRace, Gender, and the New Biocitizen
Dorothy Roberts
Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals’ unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. In this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 lecture, Dorothy Roberts examines the role of race and gender in the construction of this new biocitizen in light of the current expansion of race-based, reproductive, and […]
Read MoreDid You Kiss the Dead Body? Visualizing Absence in the Archive of War
Rajkamal Kahlon
Rajkamal Kahlon, Artist-In-Residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, speaks about her ongoing project Did You Kiss the Dead Body? Kahlon works with U.S. military autopsy reports, death certificates and torture related government documents from Iraq and Afghanistan to explore the bureaucratization of death, as it intersects questions of empathy and the construction of memory. […]
Read MoreSpeak up! Establishing Online Voice through Blogging – for Barnard Students
Julie Zeilinger ’15 and Lulu Mickelson ’14
In conjunction with the launch of the BCRW Blog, this evening workshop will familiarize Barnard students with the medium of blogging–providing tools, rules, and examples to encourage participants to contribute their voices to the Blogosphere. It will cover the general guidelines of blog style and content by deconstructing the details of an effective post, discussing […]
Read MoreDigital Community Formation
Jon Beller, Brittney Cooper, Gail Drakes, Dana Goldstein, Courtney Martin, Renina Jarmon
Academics and writers alike have long worked within established processes for peer-review and editing. But both are now confronted with a rapidly shifting landscape in which online channels provide new opportunities for feedback, networking, and collaborative knowledge production. In this roundtable discussion, panelists will speak on how digital media changes their work by looking at […]
Read MoreA Way Out of the “Dead-End ” of Feminism vs. Islam : The Potential and Promise of Feminist Voices in Islam
Ziba Mir-Hosseini
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a growing confrontation between political Islam and feminism made links between theology, law, and politics transparent. The Islamist agenda of policing women’s presence and gender relations in public space has led to the emergence of forms of activism that have challenged patriarchal interpretations of the Shari’a […]
Read MoreA Global History of the Paternity Test
Nara Milanich
For millennia, Western legal tradition relied on the assumption “pater semper incertus est” (“the father is always uncertain”). But beginning in the early twentieth century, scientists began a concerted quest for a biological marker of paternity that could unambiguously link a child to his or her progenitor. Prior to the advent of DNA testing, scientists […]
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